Originally posted by rigel4
A meteor and asteroid: Really improbable
The probability that a meteor hits and an asteroid passes by Earth on the same day is about 1 in 100 million, a Yale professor says.

With odds like that it makes Nuclear war an odds on favourite by comparison.

Which Yale professor, please?

A lot meteorites hit the planet per year (estimates are about 37,000 - 78,000 tons/year, that is a lot of rock lol)... its just matter of size. He
must be counting the fact that this russian one was a special one because of its size.

I sincerelty think the hypothesis of the connection in between the big asteroid that has approached the earth in the last month and this meteorite
falling in south western Siberia is indeed interesting and deservers a more carefully analysis.

However what really is intriguing the Scientific comunity about the incident of the small Asteroid that fell the Friday in the south east Ural region
( the NASA has confirmed today that it was actually a small asteroid and not a meteorite due to the size and mass of the object) is that is the second
important even of this nature occurring in Siberia after the so called Tunguska event of june 1908.

Although this asteroid is not of the same magnitude of the one that caused the terrible esplosion of 1908, however is quite interesting the
coincidence.

In the centenary of the Tunguska event on my thread of 2008, I posted the hypothesis that there is a giant vortex of energy that covers vast areas of
Siberia, some kind of Bermuda triangle on the russian Taiga, something that has been supported by some Russian archaelogists along the last decade.
Based on that assumption I predicted that we were going to experience another incident like the original one few years after that centenary, as it
actually happened this Friday.

In my original forecast I stated that this event was going to change gradually the opinion in the scientific circles that Tunguska was not an
isolated or accidental case but part of a phenomenon that is periodic and so repeats in the same region every certain time.

Of course, to see another really megatonic explosion, like the one of 1908, probably we have to wait a lot of more time, as I also pointed in that
occasion.

I posted the hypothesis that there is a giant vortex of energy that covers vast areas of Siberia, some kind of Bermuda triangle on the russian
Taiga, something that has been supported by some Russian archaelogists along the last decade.

I've been thinking about this also. What do you think about the possibility of large underground magnetite (and other) resources in that area, a
natural occurrence that could explain 'the attraction' ?

Some interesting Chelyabinsk facts... The 'unluckiest' place on earth?

The stats just keep getting weirder for this incident.

The tiny asteroid / meteorite exploded over / fell upon the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. This region was a state secret nuclear complex for more than
40 years and has had many radioactive incidents. It was built by Gulag inmates. Reportedly more than 400,000 people irradiated in 45 years.

''Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.''

Meteor explodes over Russian city of Chelyabinsk with force of more than 30 Hiroshima A-bombs The Friday morning explosion that injured 1,200
residents with its blast shockwave was caused by a 10,000-ton fireball that burned brighter than the sun as it unleashed nearly 500 kilotons of energy
over Russia's Urals region. Read more:
www.nydailynews.com...

In the late 1940's, about 80 kilometers north of the city of Chelyabinsk, an atomic weapons complex called "Mayak" was built. Its existence has only
recently been acknowledged by Russian officials. Mayak, bordered to the west by the Ural Mountains, and to the north by Siberia, was the goal of Gary
Powers's surveillance flight in May of 1960. For forty-five years, the Chelyabinsk province of Russia was closed to all foreigners. Only in January of
1992 did President Boris Yeltsin sign a decree changing that. As a result, western scientists who studied the region, declared Chelyabinsk to be the
most polluted spot on earth.

The Mayak Production Association (Russian: Производственное объединение «Маяк», from Маяк "lighthouse") is an
industrial complex which is one of the biggest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation. It housed plutonium production reactors and a
reprocessing plant. Located 150 km south-east of Ekaterinburg between the towns of Kasli and Tatysh 72 km northwest of Chelyabinsk, the closest city
to the nuclear complex is Ozyorsk, the central administrative territorial district. As part of the Russian nuclear weapon program, Mayak was formerly
known as Chelyabinsk-40 and later as Chelyabinsk-65 after the postal codes of the site.[1] In 1957, Mayak was the site of one of the worst nuclear
accidents in history when the explosion of a poorly maintained storage tank released 50-100 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste, contaminating a
huge territory in the eastern Urals and causing numerous deaths and injuries from radiation poisoning. The Soviet regime kept this accident secret for
about 30 years. The event was eventually rated at 6 on the seven-level INES scale, third in severity only to the disasters at Chernobyl in the Ukraine
and Fukushima in Japan. Working conditions at Mayak, and a lack of environmental responsibility in the past, led to additional contamination of the
surrounding lake district and severe health hazards and accidents. Some areas are still under restricted access because of radiation. In the past 45
years, about 400,000 people in the region have been irradiated in one or more of the incidents.[2] Mayak was a target of Gary Powers' U-2 surveillance
flight in May 1960

The Mayak plant was built in 1945–48, in a great hurry and in total secrecy, as part of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapon program. The plant's
original mission was to make, refine, and machine plutonium for weapons. Five nuclear reactors were built for this purpose. Later the plant came to
specialize in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors, and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. Today the plant makes tritium and
radioisotopes, but no plutonium. In recent years, proposals that the plant reprocess, for money, waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise
to controversy. In the early years of its operation, the Mayak plant released quantities of radioactively contaminated water into several small lakes
near the plant, and into the Techa river, whose waters ultimately flow into the Ob River. The downstream consequences of this radiation pollution have
yet to be determined. Some residents of Ozersk claim that living there poses no present-day risk, because of the decrease in the ambient radiation
level over the past 50 years.[citation needed] They also report no problems with their health and the health of Mayak plant workers.[citation needed]
However, these claims lack hard verification, and many who worked at the plant in 1950s and 1960s subsequently died of the effects of radiation.[5][6]
While the situation has since improved, the administration of the Mayak plant has been repeatedly criticized in recent years for environmentally
unsound practices.[citation needed]

Editor's note: Meg Urry is the Israel Munson professor of physics and astronomy and chairwoman of the department of physics at Yale University, where
she is the director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

She does seem to be quite well qualified to make such a statement ...yes

All this fuss about a little iron ball!
I can't wait until March 10th when a new thread will be bound to start about something completely different.
Except it might have a lot of little iron balls in it....

Editor's note: Meg Urry is the Israel Munson professor of physics and astronomy and chairwoman of the department of physics at Yale University, where
she is the director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

She does seem to be quite well qualified to make such a statement ...yes

the chance of both events happening on any one day are indeed very small: 1 in 3,650 days times 1 in 36,500 days, or about 1 in 100 million -- not
odds you would bet against.

So what is the probability that the meteor hits and the asteroid passes Earth on the same day when someone could record it on video? That's probably
been possible for about 50 years, or only about five years if we have to do it on a smartphone or dashboard camera. That's 1,825 days, which means the
chance of someone filming the event is only about one in 70,000 -- and that's if people blanketed the Earth. Given how sparsely the Earth is
populated, we should correct this number downward by a (large!) geographical factor. It's also unlikely that this event would happen within 3,000
miles of the Tunguska impact.

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